I'm always (well, often) pleased to see comics that are kid-oriented, with age-appropriate material. I don't think the comic rating system is at all a bad thing although in all honesty I find it only marginally useful.
This is in great part because I have kids, and while I wouldn't hand over a comic to my seven-year-old based solely on its All Ages rating, it's a good starting point. It's not only a matter of age-appropriate material as in sex/violence, it's also a matter of kids' stories typically having the story complete in a single issue, and less arty/complex storytelling techniques (because kids haven't been alive long enough to have picked up on the cultural and media references on which so many more complex techniques are based).
That's not the only reason, though. I know that my kids are not the primary customer comic companies have in mind when they're putting a book together. That's fine. A lot of more mainstream (odd to call non-kid-friendly books mainstream, isn't it?) books are perfectly fine for the twelve-year-old (yes, she had a birthday since I last mentioned her). I read them first. (Oh, such hardship...!*) I read them, but they're not generally my favorite books of the month because, well, I like the less explicitly kid-friendly titles. You know, because I'm not a kid. There's room for both, right?
*All right, granted that most parents aren't going to find it as much fun as I do to read comics, particularly if all they get out of it is an idea of whether their kid should read it. But it's what you do.
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